Plagiarism - Essay Example

Plagiarism is a serious offence as it involves intellectual theft which is an offence against the original author. Plagiarism will entail not giving sufficient credit for another author’s ideas or words, claiming to be the author of some work without doing the work and claiming another author’s artistic or scholarly work as your own (Thompson, 2008). Plagiarism is wrong as it involves stealing another authors ideas which is morally not any better than stealing a car, or something else. It is also wrong because it represents information illiteracy as it shows that someone is not capable of researching and presenting one’s own ideas and thoughts, and this means that someone is not capable of handling their own information, which amounts to effective illiteracy.

The Internet has made cheating or plagiarism easier than ever before as there are thousands of relevant sources in the Internet and students can simply copy and paste information and use it on their term papers or essays. Students may engage in plagiarism for various reasons and it can be intentional or unintentional. At times, students are overwhelmed by workload, and they may have deadlines being the first reason for the lack of understanding of the procedures for citing materials from other sources.

Not understanding how to cite will make the student make mistakes while citing sources, and this amounts to unintentional plagiarism. Some students may have bad time management skills, which will result in plagiarizing their assignments or term papers because they do not have enough time to search for information and present it as their own through proper paraphrasing and citation. Deadlines and multiple assignments at the same time make other students plagiarize as they will have not enough time to research and present plagiarism free papers.

in the event of trying to hand in assignments on time, students will search the Internet and copy paste information so as to beat the deadlines.